Supreme Court

Court Watch: The Princeton Years, PRLDEF, and Questions About Temperament

By Garance Franke-Ruta
Today in court news, we learn about Judge Sonia Sotomayor's time at Princeton University and how that university influenced her understanding of difference and identity in America, as well as her civil rights work with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. We also hear more questions about her temperament, and her thinking on abortion rights. Meanwhile, the pushback against her critics in the punditocracy has begun -- and is being led by members of the GOP.

Politico's Ben Smith crosses the Hudson: "But for the second time in the Obama era, the stodgy Ivy League academy has emerged as a key to understanding the identity of a central player on the national stage -- this time, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who graduated from Princeton nine years earlier." Well worth a full read.

"Nominee's Links With Advocates Fuel Her Critics" report Raymond Hernandez and David W. Chen in the Times: "Ms. Sotomayor's involvement with the defense fund has so far received scant attention. But her critics, including some Republican senators who will vote on her nomination, have questioned whether she has let her ethnicity, life experiences and public advocacy creep into her decisions as a judge. It seems inevitable, then, that her tenure with the defense fund will be scrutinized during her confirmation hearings."

The Post's Robert Barnes and Michael D. Shear find that President Obama is confident that Sotomayor will defend abortion rights, even if they have not spoken of such directly. "White House officials appeared eager to send a message that abortion rights groups do not need to worry about how she might rule in a challenge to Roe v. Wade," they report.

Writing in Double X, Cornell law professor Eduardo M. Peñalver -- who clerked on the Second Circuit for Judge Guido Calabresi and on the Supreme Court for Justice John Paul Stevens -- seeks to explain Sotomayor's "wise Latina" statement: "Crucial to understanding Judge Sotomayor's argument is the way in which decisions are made in appellate courts. Both the court on which she sits and the court to which she aspires decide cases collectively. This context is crucial because a large body of social science evidence confirms Judge Sotomayor's contention that ensuring that a group includes people with a variety of viewpoints and life experiences increases the reliability of the group's decision-making process. Diverse groups are more likely to reach the right conclusion because the different members of the group complement each other's blind-spots and reduce the likelihood that commonly held, but incorrect, assumptions will carry the day." An interesting exposition of some of the social science of small group dynamics.

Peggy Noonan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, urges Republicans to "play grown-up." "She is of course a brilliant political pick--Hispanic when Republicans have trouble with Hispanics, a woman when they've had trouble with women. Her background (public housing, Newyorican, Catholic school, Princeton, prominence) is as moving as Clarence Thomas's, and that is moving indeed. Politically she's like a beautiful doll containing a canister of poison gas: Break her and you die," writes Noonan.

"Some, and they are idiots, look at Judge Sotomayor and say: attack, attack, kill. A conservative activist told the New York Times, 'We need to brand her.' Another told me a fight is needed to excite the base," she continues later in the piece. "Excite the base? How about excite a moderate, or interest an independent? How about gain the attention of people who aren't already on your side?"

On NPR, Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn rebukes Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich for crossing the line by calling Sotomayor "racist" for her "wise Latina" remarks: "I think it's terrible. This is not the kind of tone that any of us want to set when it comes to performing our constitutional responsibilities of advice and consent," Cornyn said on "All Things Considered," calling their remarks "not helpful under any circumstances."

"Neither one of these men are elected Republican officials," he said of Gingrich and Limbaugh. "...I just don't think it's appropriate. I certainly don't endorse it. I think it's wrong."

so if a white judge was a member of the kkk and he grew up poor put himself in college and helped other white people then he should one day become a supreme court judge he would have a rich history of helping others a good story

Posted by: getsix1 | May 29, 2009 3:31 PM

JUDGE SOTOMAYOR: PLEASE ASK YOURSELF THIS:

WHEN WILL TEAM OBAMA RESTORE CIVIL AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN A GRASSROOTS AMERICA WHERE OFFICIALLY-SANCTIONED 'VIGILANTE (IN)JUSTICE' RULES?

The questionable legality and constitutionality of covert, warrantless GPS tracking of unjustly targeted persons and their families FINALLY has broken through to the mainstream media:

This is the Achilles heel that can bring down the technological infrastructure of ideological or hate-motivated organized stalking and constitutionally suspect police procedures in conducting investigations of "innocent but targeted" individuals and their families.

Mainstream media: Please follow up on the Yahoo News story referenced above.

Civil libertarians: Urge lawmakers to pass a law that prevents the electronic tracking of any individual without an individual-specific (not general) court warrant...

...no more arbitrary, wholesale electronic surveillance and harassment (via federally-funded and equipped citizen vigilante gang stalkers)... and no more covert implantation of devices in vehicles or homes.

This is the issue that the public can understand. Once covert implantation of GPS devices -- or the use of an individual's cell phone as a GPS tracking device -- is definitively made illegal, any official who knowingly allows such surveillance would be an accomplice to a crime. This should be a felony and not a misdemeanor.

Victims of the "extrajudicial targeting and punishment network" spawned or expanded under Bush-Cheney (and now enabled by the inaction of the Obama Administration):

Organize a mass demonstration demanding an end to "covert GPS stalking." Such a demonstration should be aimed at the ACLU -- a demand that these declared civil libertarians address the issue that enables organized stalking of unjustly targeted people and their families.

if i white judge is going to vote for white issues he should not be a judge. it goes for Hispanic, or blacks, jewish, or in a wheelchair isn't the law is blind it puts no group in front of another, they are supposed to interpret law not make it up why cant these libs get it